The Psyche Diver Trilogy: Demon Hunters (54 page)

The demon’s throat vibrated with an animal cry as it continued to devour its sister’s flesh. Its head came up to reveal blood frothing at either side of its mouth. It saw the shadow, a hulking mass positioned at the end of the corridor. It was Hanko. The beast was soaked with blood, covered from head to foot. The beast-man locked stares with the demon across the corridor. The air hardened like glass, pulled tight with an almost tangible hatred. A short old man appeared behind Hanko, it was Enoh. He was standing still, eyes transfixed on the scene before him.

“Master Kurogosho,” he said, staring in blank horror.

As though the utterance had been a cue, Hanko burst into motion, the demon with him. An explosive shockwave punched through the air as the two bodies collided, powerful enough to warp the ceiling, floor and walls. The two monsters came apart. There was a terrific gash along Hanko’s chest, where clothing and flesh had been shredded. Kurogosho had torn off a chunk of the beast’s flesh.

Renobo was still attached to Kurogosho but the part of her between her shoulders was gone, white bone stood there in its place. Blood spurted from the cleft, splashing up into Kurogosho’s face. Blood, over blood.
Sour
—in enough quantity, the smell of blood can register as a sourness. Enoh’s nose bristled at the stench. Hanko held Renobo’s head in its hands, decapitated.

Renobo’s hips continued to thrash for a while, even with her head gone.

The moment the demon reacted, Hanko turned to run, charging right past Enoh. Kurogosho sped in to attack, Renobo’s body still connected. Enoh leapt into the air, flying through the gap between the demon and the ceiling. He landed behind Kurogosho. There was a sudden smell of burning in his nostrils.
Burning?
The building was on fire. “
Fire!”
He heard shouting.

“Master Kurogosho, you must get out!”

Kurogosho was speeding in to attack again, even as Enoh called out. Just then, a group of men came running around the corner, their footsteps noisy behind Kurogosho—they skidded to a halt when they saw the demonic form before them. It turned its blood-stained features to face them. They began to scream, attempting to scramble away. The demon gave pursuit.

“Master,” Enoh mumbled, helpless.

8

Fuminari listened to the song of the wind.

He sat heavily in the grass, making a sizable print with his legs crossed. His eyes were closed. His clothes were back on. He was still as a rock, unable to understand the thoughts going through his mind.

It felt like something, yet at the same time it felt like nothing at all. There was a flow, a constant procession of shadow-like things that moved through his flesh. He chased them through the darkness with closed eyes. As he gave chase, he listened to the sound of the wind. There was something pale, catching the breeze and swaying in the air above him.

The naked form of Kumiko.

Her bare corpse hung upside-down, strung from a branch of the birch tree, suspended from a rope around her right ankle. Her other leg wavered at an irregular angle, like a dancer preparing a step. Her arms hung below her, the fingertips dangling only fifty centimeters above Fuminari’s head. There was a gaping hole over her abdomen. No blood dripped from it—the blood in her body had long since emptied out.

Moonlight shone down, cold and blue. The wind picked up, gusting noisily through the upper-levels of the forest. Her body was a pale blue in the darkness. There was something of a pathos, a beauty to the freakish, callous scene. A beauty that was Fuminari was utterly blind of. He saw faces. Kawaguchi—one of the men he slaughtered in the Tanzawa mountains. Behind him, Kumiko, on the grass and moaning with ecstasy. Then Hanko and Enoh. Biku, Ryoko. He saw Renobo, Toyama, Akio Ishibashi…each of their faces flashed briefly before him, then faded away.

Finally, there was Hosuke. Each face wore an expression of sadness. The surging hatred that would accompany Hanko’s face was gone. There was nothing in its place. Nothing except a thing like arid scum, left behind as the hatred had wilted away.

Why had it come to this?

Fuminari considered the question. He had conned his way into the
Kokushigun
and stolen from the Towa Bank, then offloaded the blame onto the
Kokushigun
and kept the money for himself—part of his plan to live a life of luxury. But that was where he had met Kumiko.

Was that when everything began to fall apart?

Or had that happened as they stumbled onto Panshigaru’s secret ritual? Or, perhaps,
after Hanko tore off his fingers? Fuminari had no idea. All he knew was that Kumiko’s body was rocking in the wind above him.

Must it have ended this way?

He asked the question. A part of him thought it inevitable, a part of him not. The wind blew and he listened to its song, only feeling something when he imagined Ryoko’s face, or that dumb-ass look of Hosuke’s—each came with a faint warmth that spread inside him.

There was something huge, packed tight in his belly. He had no idea what it was. It felt like it might ignite, burst out of him at any moment. It was a concentration of force, powerful enough to tear his immense muscular frame to shreds. A dark power. Like a huge beast slumbering on a deep ocean bed, it was unmoving.

What is it?

He had no answer. He had no way of knowing, not until it was out of him. But it was stuck, unable to find an exit. That was what it felt like, at least. He felt like a kid that had finished crying, unable to recall his reason for crying in the first place.

What was I crying about?

He no longer understood. He only knew what he had left to do—without that, he might as well have been dead.
What he had to do
. Fuminari continued to breathe, clinging to this one thing.

I must kill Hanko
.

That was all he had left. Gone was the why of it, along with any value he believed his life to have.

I need to kill Hanko
.

The only alternative was death, there was no room for anything in between. The ongoing, sole object of his hatred had become the only thing supporting him—the beast that he despised, Hanko.

He saw the image of Hanko again, just as Renobo had stabbed Kumiko. Hanko had gone straight after that bitch Renobo, without even running to Kumiko’s side.

Could Hanko have…

He felt a sudden bizarre empathy for the beast, but it was gone in the next moment.

He knew Hanko would return eventually. That was his reason for waiting in this place. For his listening to the wind. Hanko would return, and they would settle their score. He would use his bare hands and tear Hanko apart in front of Kumiko. He would prove himself the strongest.

Yet, he felt that he would accept defeat if it came to that. All that mattered now was that they settled this thing. That, perhaps, was all he really desired.

How much time has already been lost to this?

Sometime later he heard the sound he had been waiting for, carrying on the wind. Something heavy on the grass, approaching through the night. Its footsteps grew closer before finally coming to a stop.

Fuminari opened his eyes.

There in the undergrowth, just a few meters ahead, was the lumbering, black form of Hanko. Fuminari got slowly to his feet and faced the beast. Their silence lasted over ten seconds. Then Hanko lobbed an object to where Fuminari stood. It hit the grass and came to a stop. It was Renobo’s head—her elderly features peered up at him from the ground, lips pulled tight in an expression that looked something like pleasure mixed with suffering. The expression seemed perfect to mark her death.

I see
. Fuminari nodded, finally.

It had not mattered which of them had stayed, which had left to claim Renobo’s head and bring it back. Fuminari understood now.

Of course.
He nodded again.

As he did so, he brought up his left hand for Hanko to see. He straightened each of his three fingers in turn. It felt almost superfluous, to play out this ritual to mark their transition into battle. There, resting on the palm of his hand, was a bloody fetus. He had pulled it from Kumiko’s womb after cutting her belly open. An extraordinary fury exploded from Hanko’s frame. Fuminari’s lips curled into a sly grin. Then he showed his teeth in an outlandish smile.

“We settle this now,” he muttered, tossing the unborn fetus towards Hanko’s feet. He lowered his center of gravity.

The two hulking creatures roared as one.

9

A horrific form thrashed in a wild frenzy, inside the crimson flames.

It resembled the deity Heruka—purple, swollen, and lost in ecstasy. Clinging to it was a pale, headless female form. Countless haunts swarmed in and out of the blaze.

“Master Kurogosho!”

Enoh called out to Wanioh Ishibashi, the man lost in the crazed dance. But his voice no longer reached Kurogosho’s ears. The man was blind. Unhearing. Howling in a mad frenzy. Laughing and enraptured. The demon’s head tossed from side to side the whole time it continued to devour its sister’s flesh. It was surrounded by flames. They had become an unassailable barrier between the two men. Kurogosho was visible on the other side, head and horns dancing through the air. Enoh’s clothing had begun to smolder.

10

Crimson fire erupted from Kurogosho’s residence, charring the night sky.

The powerful wind carried the flames high. Two men emerged from part of the residence yet to be engulfed by the tumult, Hosuke Kumon and Biku. Biku was carrying Kukai’s
sokushinbutsu
. They stopped midway between the residence and the outer wall as Biku turned back to look at the building.

“I guess we didn’t need to start a fire, then.”

“Seems that way,” Hosuke replied, looking back too. “It doesn’t matter, either way,” he muttered.

They kept their eyes on the building, backing towards the birch trees near the wall. Biku was the first to reach one—in the same instant he launched himself back through the air, sensing a sudden wave of animosity crashing down from above. One of the branches above them vibrated with a sharp crack. The sound was followed by a soft thud.

“Enoh!” Biku shouted.

The old man stood directly before him. He looked like a ghost. The head was gone from the mummy in Biku’s arms, Enoh’s attack had knocked it clean off. It lay on the grass between them, facing the sky. Biku let rise his own sinuous energies. Just as they were interrupted by a casual, jocular voice.

“Look at you—you come this far, then you lose your fucking head.”

Hosuke Kumon strolled between the two men and took Kukai’s head in his hands.

The tension between Enoh and Biku seemed to melt away. Enoh’s expression became that of a pained grin.

“You!”
A joker to the last…
Enoh held back the rest of the sentence. “Yes, perhaps it is too late for fighting.” The words seemed to carry the weight of a great exhaustion.

“Perhaps it is,” Biku agreed. The red flames flickered alluringly over his crimson lips.

“There were less than twenty of us inside. Now, half are dead and the rest have likely escaped.”

“One of those escapees may be watching us now. Are you okay with that?” Hosuke asked.

“By which you mean?”

“Won’t it land you in trouble? If you’re seen being friendly with us...”

Enoh’s pained grin returned. “Not anymore.”

“Hoo.”

“Master Kurogosho is in there, in the blaze. I told him to run, but he continued to feed on Mistress Renobo,” he muttered with quiet derision.

Hosuke’s eyes were fixed on Enoh, they hardened suddenly. “While we’re here like this,” he started, tossing Kukai’s head in his hands. “Did you know that shit I ate was Yuko?” It looked like he was asking the head in his hands.

“And if I said I did?”

“Just tell me,” Hosuke murmured.

“I realized what it was—whose meat it was—when I ate it. But not before.”

“Hah.” Hosuke grinned, scratching his scalp. The hardness in his eyes was gone.

“Now, if you would let me ask a question,” Enoh suggested.

“Yeah?”

“What did you do to Master Kurogosho?”

“Nothing…”

“You want me to believe that Master Kurogosho ended up like that without your doing anything?”

Hosuke scratched his head. “That old guy had
balls.
I was ready to let Kukai’s monsters devour him—but no, he started to eat them back. Although, maybe it’s more accurate to say he was eating them as they ate him—they merged into a single entity. Their minds must have matched pretty well.”

“That explains it.”

“Pretty much.”

“What were those things inside Kukai, after all?” Enoh asked.

“You really wanna know?” Hosuke grinned slyly. He remembered the taste of the darkness he had eaten. It was something he could never forget, regardless of how he might try. “They were Kukai.”

“What?”

“A part of Kukai, at least. And now they’re inside Kurogosho. Do you remember what I said before? About there being a route, some kind of passageway that would show us how he got to the other side, or wherever it was he went.”

“Yes.”

“That was me bullshitting you. But…it turns out I was actually pretty close to the truth.”

“Indeed?”

“During the dive I was looking for the entrance to wherever it was Kukai had gone. In the end that entrance, along with the black stuff, turned out to be a part of Kukai’s consciousness.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means that before Kukai left, he cast off all of his feelings of lust. They stayed behind. The creatures we saw were the embodiment of that lust. Just as they were entrance points to Kukai’s nirvana. It stayed in the place Kukai had used to get away. It planted root structures that, as I’d said before, spent the last thousand-plus years growing.”

“And how do you know this?”

“I ate a part of it. Each part contains an image of the whole. The flavor was pretty diluted, but it was enough to get a sense of the entirety. Kukai’s got this girl he’s fucking in China. That’s the memory he expunged when he left for nirvana. They’re in a temple somewhere. It was faint, but clear enough to piece the image together. Kukai fucked a girl in Tang China. We can ignore whatever led to
that happening, but what’s clear is that Kukai’s lust for her stayed with him until the moment of his death.”